01.15.06

Movies: A Review of Two

Posted in Movies at 3:40 pm by Moody

[image]Born into Brothels: Documentary; 2004; Unrated; 1h 35m. Highly recommended.

A bittersweet but ultimately uplifting look into the lives of eight children growing up in Sonagachi, one of Calcutta, India’s red light districts. Zana Briski, a photojournalist and founder of Kids with Cameras, gave each child a camera with which to document her or his world. The results were phenomenal and life-altering for many of the participants. Briski’s project differs from what one normally sees in a documentary; from the outset, it is obvious that she is very personally involved with the children. As she struggles with the children’s relatives and the government’s bureaucracy in order to help them escape a future with little or no hope, we see the world through the children’s photography and in interviews with each of them.

The children are endearing, though there is nothing saccharine in Born into Brothels. What is immediately apparent is that these are smart, inquisitive kids in dire straits. In their eyes is a maturity beyond their years, thrust upon them by the circumstances of their lives. It is apparent to them, as it is to us, that there is little hope they will ever have “normal” lives. The girls are especially at risk, as they are headed for “the line” - a life of prostitution on the streets. The boys are headed for the same dead ends their older male relatives have wound up in.

In the end, Briski’s efforts rescue a number of the children whose photography and lives we’ve been privileged to view, though not all the kids are so fortunate. Reviewer Collin Souter says it well: “Usually, documentaries ask hard, probing questions. Refreshingly, ‘Born Into Brothels’ is about a person with an answer”. In the end, the hard part of the movie is understanding that there is so much against any child in Sonagachi escaping, and knowing that, for the majority of children there, there is no escape. Briski shows, however, that something can be done (by someone in a position to do something), and her efforts for the children of the red light district send a clear and uplifting message. Her efforts are a clarion call for involvement where involvement is possible. She deserves a medal.

[image]Me and You and Everyone We Know: Drama (with comedic elements); 2005; Rated “R”; 1hr 37m. Recommended.

Performance artist Miranda July’s strange and sweet debut film falls somewhere between Punch Drunk Love and Broken Flowers in tone and pacing, with a very light sprinkling of Welcome to the Dollhouse (sans the merciless self-hatred). “Offbeat” seems to be the keyword among reviewers, and it certainly is that. But to label it merely as offbeat is to miss its more accessible messages about love and the fleeting nature of our lives’ moments.

Following the lives of a few main characters through periods of transition and difficulty, July (who stars in the film) deftly hones in on the emotional pink noise that underlies daily life, extracting from it an intimate portrait of the human desire to lose oneself and thereby, with luck, find one’s meaning in what one loves.

01.12.06

With time on my hands, I read. (Pt. 2)

Posted in Evolution, Literature, Magazines, Novels, Science at 5:27 pm by Moody

Current and imminent reading:

[image]The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, by Richard Dawkins

Thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for pointing me in the direction of this work. I sincerely hope you’ll take a look at Dawkins’s 2004 “Notable Book of the Year” (and, yes, I know it’s 2006, now, thank you - but I was freakin’ busy, okay?), because right about now - with all the stupid things going on out there with regard to the ludicrous attacks on the theory of evolution by ignorant/backward people - it’s a very good time to bone up on your scientific knowledge and understanding.

[image]The Moon of Hoa Binh, by Cong Huyen Ton Nu Nha Trang and William L. Pensinger

This is what I am currently attempting to read, and, let me tell you, it is no small undertaking, this one. It is a 1704 page challenge, called “the Vietnam War’s War & Peace” by one reviewer. Here is the official synopsis-in-a-nutshell:

Set in the intelligence underworld of Saigon in 1968 and at a scientific conference in Kyoto nine years later, the novel involves a murder mystery, a scientific exegesis, a metaphysical treatise, a psychological diatribe, through which aspects of the Vietnamese and Japanese cultures and their contemporary histories are explored.

Yeah; it’s so like that. I recommend, if you are so inclined, that you visit the site dedicated to this obscure, fascinating work. The site offers a longer synopsis, information about the authors (who are married), bonus materials and “Genealogical Mosaics of [the main character’s] Identity Transparency”.

[image]Scientific American (Special Edition)

“The Frontiers of Physics” is the title, and the issue covers everything from surpassing the standard model and the future of string theory to violations of relativity and the mysteries of mass. None of which I am especially knowledgeable about, but all of which I am interested in.

With time on my hands, I read. (Pt. 1)

Posted in Literature, Novels, Short Stories/Oddities at 11:00 am by Moody

Recently read:

[image]Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling

The sixth installment in Rowling’s series finds Harry facing his greatest trial so far, with promises of graver difficulties to come, as he comes to face the dire nature of his (apparent) fate.

While I would not go so far as to compare Rowling’s opus to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, I do think it compares quite favorably to The Hobbit. Even as the adult themes become more pronounced, it is clear that Rowling’s intended audience is still a youthful one. Adults may certainly enjoy the HP series, as they enjoyed The Hobbit, that much is obvious, but one would never mistake it for, say, Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of… books. This is not a complaint about Rowling’s series, which my pre-teen daughter has read and enjoyed every installment of, but an observation with an attendant caveat: the series, while engaging itself in lessons about the difficulties of growing up and the gray areas of life that must be dealt with, is written well within the parameters of “young adult literature”, and therefore does not provide the scope, in breadth or depth, of the adult register, even when the matter at hand is typically an adult one. For a contrast to the HP series, see Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which expertly introduces young readers to adult issues in a way that they can understand and learn from.

This brings me to my only real complaint about the HP series. As much as I have personally enjoyed the story so far, have grown attached to its main characters and been delighted by the world of wizards as Rowling has re-created it, I have felt somewhat disappointed in her handling of Harry’s maturation, especially as he is the protagonist, the sine qua non of her story. I found myself, at the end of The Half-Blood Prince (once the emotional turmoil of the last two chapters had faded, that is), feeling particularly critical of Harry’s rather unreflective behavior throughout the series, or, put another way, of Rowling’s handling of Harry’s psyche as adversity and tragedy continue to temper it. But perhaps I am missing something. Perhaps Rowling is simply portraying the truth of an adolescent boy, for whom such lessons are unconsciously assimilated at first, to be unpacked and dealt with only later. Perhaps Rowling has observed that, for a younger audience, it’s important to leave the emotional interpretations of story events to them, rather than to “tell” too much via the main character’s own dealings and understanding. Perhaps, in writing such a lengthy story, some things have to be left out. However, I think that Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy proves that a young person’s self-reflective maturation can be dealt with, and that doing so proves to be the more rewarding route for the story’s intended audience.

[image]Memories of My Melancholy Whores, by Gabriel García Márquez

A lovely, disturbing, wonderful and moving work of literature. I am at a loss for words in its wake, if only because I don’t want to gush. In a mere 115 pages, the master of magic realism has shown his voice to be as strong as ever, his pitch perfect (for a novella), his vision pure and true to the heart of life in all its complexities and conundrums. While some have harshly criticized the work on a number of fronts - from subject matter to the treatment of same - I found the author to be, yet again, unfettered by convention and more than capable of spinning a fully realized tale worth the telling. It is no Lolita redux that we are offered here, but rather a mature view into an old man’s imperfect ex post facto coming of age. The story is provocative, certainly, but it is neither an exercise in pathos nor an ode to pedophilia. Looked at as a metaphor, it is easier to see where the author is going. There is, in the end, a very human redemption for the old man in his pursuit of a youthful love, and detractors who see only a perverse relationship unfolding are missing the psychologically rich quality of the story.

[image]The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, by George Saunders

I can really do no better than to point you to Saunders’s own piece on why he wrote this remarkable, darkly comedic, highly recommended work. I suppose I could, in order to whet your appetite, quote this much from it:

I found myself writing, “Once there was a country that was too small for all its inhabitants to fit inside at once.” Soon the story was going off in an unexpected direction, and was becoming that rare and not-so-sought-after thing, a kid’s story about genocide. The characters evolved from abstract shapes to beings I thought of as Conglomerates, composed of flesh and machine parts and vegetative portions. One group, led by Phil, was soon trying to eliminate the other group, and Phil, talking in Stalinist rants whenever his brain fell off, was consolidating his power a lá Hitler, surrounding himself with brown-nosing Advisors, brainless needy henchman, and groveling media spokespersons, and then murdering the opposition in gruesome ways. Needless to say, all hope for marketing tie-ins vanished.

Really, you owe it to yourself to pick this slim novel up - perhaps along with Julio Cortázar’s also brilliantly entertaining work, Cronopios and Famas.

01.08.06

the perfidious sponge

Posted in Mine, Poetry at 7:56 pm by Moody

unfaze the splines of this giddy scorch
deny the coruscation of indeterminate appeal -
lo! bark the lounges of enigma shin-wise and reveal
soft disparate knowledges as crunchy pluralistic spores!

we who are flattened hammers of incision
cut the nail from the music box,
arrange the maelstroms and behemoths in lines
as long as life sentences
with every stroke of our claw pins
(which we have inked in the blood
of bookworms).

denounce the retrofitted exacerbation as pride
unfounded in the dithyrambs of spastic lyres!
renounce the supra-ceded sui generis and abide
within the cozy confines of comfy eclectic wires!

marrow - marrow - morrow! ha!

we have no illusions: what is illustrious today
will tomorrow be as cotton candy in the rain.
energy drinks, cameras and canon fodder will
replace the delineation of rhymes with imagistic
confetti.

there is no shame in the shambles of our itinerant supply,
for heady splines can not but splint the symbols of the dawn
with nascent anomalies unnamed in hammered holes -
thus producing an origami vernacular pre-accustomed
to both bonsai and baobabs
in paper form,
well lit.

un-endow the walls of shadows and sighs
and let the wallflowers return to their ditties in the garden
(all thorn and sour mash,
compost and reticulated hours)
where they might perchance arrive at the unbidden bowl
wherein all things are given the punch of non-existence -
if only as a talisman in the indicative mode,
moonlike and arguably ineffable.

eccentric as these orbits be. like a turtle’s. a happenstance melange. unique.
we alone remake our unformed soliloquies as pop standards.

01.02.06

Dover, PA, Will Evolve

Posted in Politics, Religion/Spirituality, Science at 11:50 pm by Moody

It seems a shame to me that so much of our time as a nation should be wasted on activities so patently contrary to those envisioned by its founders when they spoke of individuals’ liberties and the “pursuit of happiness”. We were never, as a nation of people as varied as autumn leaves, intended to beset one another with litigious conflicts over matters of personal persuasion. The yearly Butter Battles would, in light of their modern extents, confound the senses and pain the hearts of more than a few of our nation’s founders, I’m quite sure. Although there are certainly issues worthy of intense, extensive and ongoing conversation in the hallowed halls of our government’s branches - universal healthcare, say, or abortion, or dismantling institutionalized racism - we seem all too easily tied up in lesser issues that more than border on the absurd. Perhaps the situation is indicative of slippage in the quality of education in our schools and, causally related, in our homes.

Case in point: Evolution v. “Intelligent Design”. Read the rest of this entry »